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Nikolay Kluyev (1884-1937)
From the Interrogation Record
Question: What are your views on Soviet reality and your attitude to the politics of the Communist Party and Soviet authority? Answer: ... I come from ancient stock, going back on my mother's side to the Archpriest Avvakum. I was brought up on the Old Russian culture of Korsun, Kiev and Novgorod, and was sustained by love for the Old Russia of Peter the Great*, whose bard I am. The building of socialism in the USSR, realilzed under the dictature of the proletariat, conclusively destroyed my dream of Old Russia. This is the origin of my hostile attitude to Soviet authority, which is directed towards the socialist reconstruction of the country. I regard the practical measures associated with this policy as the use of force by the state against the people, whose blood is being shed and whose pain is scorching. Question: What expression do your views find in your literary activity? Answer: My views have found exhaustive expression in my work. I can make this answer more concrete by explaining further. I explained my view that the October Revolution plunged the country in an abyss of suffering and made it the most miserable country in the world in my poem "There are demons of plague, leprosy and cholera..." I consider that the policy of industrialization destroys the foundation and beauty of the folk life of the Russian people, and that this destruction is accompanied by the suffering and destruction of millions of Russian people. I expressed this in the "Song of Gamayun"... I expressed this thought more precisely and concretely in a poem about the Balomor-Baltic canal. ...I expressed my view on collectivisation as a process that is destroying the Russian village and is destructive for the Russian people in the long poem "The Burned Ruins" (Pogorelishchina")... 15 February 1934 Lubyanka
(From "Written in Prison". XX Century.Russia") Bilingual edition - English/Russian.
*The original Russian text reads "the old Russia before Peter the Great". DREAR
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